Gears have played an important role ever since machinery has been used. They greatly improve the operating efficiency of machines whether in kinetic or mechanical linkage applications. Manufacturing industries at present have a great demand for automation. In production machinery, gears are widely used in various types of linkage mechanisms. With constant improvements and developments, gears have also evolved into many different types and specifications, and can perform various functions. For instance, in addition to the simplest spur gears, there are precise gears, helical gears, bolt troughs and T shafts, worms and worm gears, ratchets and standard gears. Nowadays gears are almost ubiquitously employed in everything in people's daily life, such as machines and instruments in industries, and transportation facilities. Printers or multifunctional office machines have multiple power driving devices, which generally consist of a plurality of gears. To ensure that the gear sets function properly and smoothly, each gear set must be injected with lubricating oil before assembly.
Gear lubrication is the most commonly adopted maintenance method. Lubrication enables gears to maintain optimal operating conditions. Commonly adopted gear lubrication methods include grease lubrication, submerged lubrication; force-feed lubrication (circulating feeding oil), etc. The method to be adopted mainly depends on gear utilization. Selection criteria are gear perimeters and rotation speed. Low speed gears generally adopt grease lubrication; intermediate speed gears adopt submerged lubrication, and high-speed gears adept force-feed lubrication. Among these methods, grease lubrication is the most commonly used. It is performed before the gears are assembled, and is done manually by dispensing lubricating oil with grease guns on the gear axle holes or gear grooves to form a layer of oil on the gear surfaces. The purpose is to make the gears slide easily between them, reduce the coefficient of friction between the gear surfaces, control rising temperature resulting from friction between the gears, and provide cooling for the gear surfaces.
However, to inject oil manually involves complicated operations. Operators have to constantly disassemble the gears, inject oil into the axle holes, assemble the gears again, and inject oil into the gear grooves. These tasks are tedious and time-consuming, which reduces efficiency. Moreover, during oil injection operations, operators often directly press the oil outlet of the grease gun on the gear grooves or axle holes to save time, causing the oil outlet to become larger after repeated operations. As a result, oil dispensing becomes difficult to control and easily results in waste. In addition, after the assembly and oil injection operations are repeatedly performed, operation processes are prone error, resulting in lower assembly quality.